This folder contains replication files for “Must Watch Propaganda: The Marginal Treatment Effect of Foreign Media among Always-Takers” by Robert Gulotty and Zeyang (Arthur) Yu. This readme file explains the content. This replication archive contains three main folders, the contents of which are described below:
1. data
2. code
3. results

(1) The ‘data’ folder contains 2 (dta format) data files. We get the original data get from Kern and Hainmueller (2009). These data pertain to the study application. The original data is za6008.dta in the data folder. The cleaned data used in the analysis is kh_2009pa_cleaned.dta.

(2) The ‘code’ folder contains 6 R files and 3 Stata do files for replicating the empirical and simulation results in the paper. The following R code requires packages from CRAN: ‘AER’, ‘boot’, ‘data.table’, ‘foreign’, ‘ggplot2’, ‘gurobi’, ‘ivmte’, ‘MASS’, ‘Matrix’, ‘plm’, ‘readstata13’, ‘slam’, ‘splines2’, ‘stats’, ‘tidyverse’, ‘xlsx’, ‘xtable’. The Stata code requires ‘clrbound’. Finally, it is necessary to install Gurobi (https://www.gurobi.com) for several scripts.

‘kh_2009pa_clean.do’ cleans the original data used in Kern and Hainmueller (2009).

‘kh_2009pa_replication.do’ replicates the following tables in the paper: 1) Table F1: Replicated LATE Estimates in Kern and Hainmueller (2009); 2) Table H1: Summary Statistics in Kern and Hainmueller (2009).

‘kh_2009pa_id_quantities.do’ replicates: 1) Table 2: Identifiable Quantities in Kern and Hainmueller (2009).

‘kh_2009pa_extrap_nonlp.Rmd’ replicates: 1) section 4.3 Extrapolation 1: Point Estimates by Linearizing MTR Pairs; 2) Table J1: Manski and MTR Bounds in Kern and Hainmueller (2009); 3) Table J2: Sensitivity Analysis of b in STR and SMTR Assumptions.

‘kh_2009pa_extrap_lp.Rmd’ (note that we use Gurobi and the ivmte package for running this file) replicates: 1) Figure 1: Weights for Cross Moments; 2) Figure 2: Extrapolate ATEs of Always-Takers and Never-Takers by Linear Programming; 3) Figure 5: Robustness Check: Extrapolate ATEs of Always-Takers and Never-Takers by Linear Programming.

‘kh_2009pa_test_iv_validity.do’ replicates the following table in the paper (note that we use the clrbound command to Stata to implement the test): 1) Table G1: IV Validity Test for Kern and Hainmueller (2009).

‘r_ate_at_code_nonlp.R’ replicates the following results (note that we do not use Gurobi in this file): 1) Table D1: Relevant Quantities in Simulation Set-up; 2) Table D2: Summary of Identifiable Quantities; 3) Table D3: Summary of Target Parameters 3) Section D.4.1 Point Identification Based on Parametric Assumptions on MTE functions; 4) Section D.4.3 Manski Bounds; 5) D.4.4 Bounds of Monotone Treatment Response; 6) Table D5: Sensitivity Analysis of b in STR and SMTR Assumptions; 7) Figure 3: Plot of Marginal Treatment Response (MTR) Pairs; 8) Figure 4: Plot of MTR and Approximated MTR Pairs.

‘r_ate_at_code_nonlp.Rmd’ produces the results in ‘r_ate_at_code_nonlp.R’ in R Markdown file.

‘r_ate_at_code_table_d4_poly2.Rmd’ replicates the results in Table D4 with polynomial order equals to 2.

‘r_ate_at_code_table_d4_poly4.Rmd’ replicates the results in Table D4 with polynomial order equals to 4.

‘r_ate_at_code_table_d4_poly6.Rmd’ replicates the results in Table D4 with polynomial order equals to 6.

(3) The ‘results’ folder contains 2 subfolders.
The subfolder ‘figure’ contains the figures in the paper. The subfolder ‘table’ contains the raw outputs for the tables in the paper. kh_2009pa_cleaned.dta is the cleaned data for the analysis.

(*) Approximate runtimes for the codes above on a standard laptop (Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10610U CPU @ 1.80GHz, 2304 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), Windows 11 Pro) All files can take less than 1 minute to run.
